The city of Kiruna, in the north of Sweden, is subsiding due to land deformation caused by mining activity at Kirunavaara on the western border of the city. The city is about to undergo one of the biggest urban transformations of our time; in a project financed by the mining company and municipality the entire city will be relocated approximately two miles east over the course of the next century.

Swedish practice White Arkitekter won an international competition for the relocation of the city in 2013 and earlier this year the first phase of their 100-year strategy broke ground.

The relocation of Kiruna is a huge challenge, provoking anxiety and anticipation among its 18,200 citizens. It is also an unparalleled opportunity for Kiruna to transform itself into a more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable city. White’s vision for the transformation of Kiruna will take place in phases with the aim to create a sustainable model city, a city with a diverse economy that is less dependent on the world market for iron ore and a city which better serves it diverse and thriving community. The new Kiruna will offer residents a better place to live whilst transposing the character, familiarity and sense of place of the Kiruna they know.

White’s team includes architects, urban planners, researchers and social anthropologists working together to forge a meaningful dialogue with the residents of Kiruna about the future of their city. Krister Lindstedt and Viktoria Walldin of White will jointly present the vision for this major transformation focusing on the cultural, economic and social dimension of master-planning the relocation of an entire city.

Many cities around the world have been largely auto-constructed by their residents. Peripheral urbanisation refers to these auto-constructed modes of production of urban space that have three main defining characteristics. First, they operate with a specific temporality: they are long-term processes that create spaces that are always in the making. Second, they frequently unsettle official logics of legal property, formal labour, state regulation, and market capitalism. Nevertheless, they do not contest these logics directly as much as operate with them in transversal ways. Third, they generate new modes of politics through practices that produce new kinds of citizens, claims, circuits, and contestation. Cities produced through peripheral urbanisation are usually highly unequal and the quality of different sections of the urban space varies considerably. They are also perennially transforming themselves.

In this talk, Teresa Caldeira explores the main characteristics of processes of peripheral urbanisation and discusses some of the ways in which they have been transformed recently, both by gentrification and by the introduction of large scale production of low income housing for the market.